Old Injil
A magocratic civilisation of the ancient past, Old Injil was the first human empire in Kerlonnic history, and the only one whose territories extended beyond the modern boundaries of the continent. The first written records of Old Injili civilisation date back to circa Pre-Marnic Year 2940, some thirty-seven centuries ago. Then a loose collection of city-states along the coasts of the Sea of Injil, the Old Injili culture gradually came under the control of the island of Imrohaaj, which, by around PMY 2590, had become the capital of a state uniting all Injili cultures under one government. At about the same period, Imrohaaj itself underwent violent political upheaval, a conflict between its priesthood, the ruling class and masters of divine magic, and the wizardly orders, whose powers came from the arcane. In the end, the Old Injili state came firmly under the control of the wizards, who established a magocracy led by a man known as Kjuptal. Declaring that “all scriptures are the works of buffoons, knaves, and night-prowling demons,” Kjuptal ordered the wholesale slaughter of the priesthood, the razing of their temples, and the ritual execution of all idols. In the place of the priestly religion, Kjuptal created a new “cult of the arcane,” wherein arcane magic was conceived of as a divinity immanent throughout the cosmos, and wizards were to be regarded as agents of that force. For the next thousand years, Kjuptal remained the Eternal Emperor, cheating death with a combination of arcane and divine practices even as the wizards who served him destroyed divine traditions across the breadth of their dominion. Founding Year In the Old Injili calendrical system, the unification of the empire under the leadership of the Emperor Kjuptal took place in “the Forty-Sixth Year of the Third Chalturruk”: their calendrical system was not based on a purely linear progression of years, but on a series of repeating cycles, each cycle containing a given number of years. From what historians have been able to puzzle out, this would put the year of unification at (approximately) PMY 2593. Capital City Imrohaaj (destroyed at end of Binding War); Kulzagheril (interim capital after Binding War until the end of the empire) History The Binding War Myths and legends of cultures across Kerlonna, even in modern Injil, almost invariably attribute the decline and fall of the Old Injili Empire to “the anger of the Gods burning bright against the sons of Kjuptal.” The dissenters in this case are modern wizards of the Guild, who, while admitting that the Gods were certainly a major factor in the fall of the magocracy, claim that the real reason for Old Injil’s breakup was the same reason for its glorious ascendancy: Kjuptal. Obsessed with conquering his own mortality, the Eternal Emperor was capable of dramatically slowing down the aging process, but could not eliminate it altogether. As his body inevitably decayed over the passage of centuries, Kjuptal turned to ever more dangerous magic that carried the promise of immortality. Nobody today knows what esoteric and soul-shattering paths of magic he pursued, but all know what the result was: he did achieve immortality at an impossible cost, his sanity burned away alongside his body’s weakness. In his madness, Kjuptal declared that the arcane had manifested itself in him as the ultimate being: Man, King, and God. So glorious and terrible was his presence that many of the magocracy were convinced, and those that did not believe knelt before him nonetheless, out of sheer dread and awe. In Imrohaaj was raised a temple of gold and onyx, with a great sacrificial fire burning at the sanctum. Bulls and stallions were slain in the Eternal Emperor’s name, and his closest devotees drank the blood and declared themselves “Angels of His Hatred.” As time went by, Kjuptal’s delusion deepened, until he began to demand human sacrifices, slaves and captives who were beheaded upon an altar, their bodies thrown into the flames and their heads hung from the temple ceiling. The tipping point came when, in the grips of a lunatic rage, Kjuptal demanded that a wizard be sacrificed to him. At that moment, those wizards who were not completely loyal to Kjuptal realized that not even they were safe from his perversion, and so they rose up against him. The Binding War was a struggle within the magocracy between the rebels, who sought to restore the secular vision that Kjuptal himself had once advocated, and the loyalists, who worshipped Kjuptal as the one true god. Records of it are plentiful (by the sparse standards of surviving traces of Old Injil), with both sides authoring much propaganda in attempts to inspire defections. The non-magical population was hardly involved in the war, since no matter which way it was concluded, all power would remain firmly in the grasp of the wizards. Thousands of wizards either perished or were stripped of their powers through the course of this civil war, and the day-to-day administration of the empire became an almost superhuman task, since some provinces changed hands between loyalists and rebels more than a dozen times. At last, however, the rebels dealt a crippling blow to their foes through sheer audacity: they destroyed Imrohaaj, their own capital, since it had become by then the heart of the loyalist forces. More than half of humanity’s arcane and worldly knowledge drowned there, alongside two hundred thousand people. The only survivor of that calamity was Kjuptal himself, who rose from the sea in the fullness of his horrific majesty, his skin stripped away, his blood all turned to raging fire. As the skies above forked with a thousand lightning bolts and the winds tossed the seas to a frothing fury of hissing steam, the greatest among the rebels fought to slay the man who they had once called their lord. In the end, they found that Kjuptal was beyond their power to kill, but he need not die to be defeated. Instead, they bound him with the most powerful abjuration spells that they could muster, turned his body to stone with transmutation, and cast him to the bottom of the sea. Although Kjuptal was defeated and Imrohaaj laid to waste, there were still thousands of loyalists scattered across the breadth of Old Injil, as well as in the world beyond. Over the course of fifty years, rebel agents quested across Maelris, and even into otherworldly planes, capturing or killing every loyalist who refused to turn to the rebel cause. When the last of the foemen had been captured and imprisoned, the rebels could at last face the task of rebuilding a better and more glorious Empire, this time in the name of total freedom from the tyranny of kings and gods. The War for the Dawn and the Fall of Old Injil But it was too late. The rebels had already condemned the Empire to death, for they had not realised the greatest tyranny of all, the virtual and actual enslavement of millions of non-wizards, whether they were human, dwarven, or whatever else. Seizing the opportunity presented by Old Injil’s vulnerability, the first slave rebellions broke out among the dwarves of the distant west, who were led by a man named Romaldur that called himself a “prophet of the Faceless God.” The dwarves had long been considered the empire’s most docile subjects, a shy and slow-witted race of blind troglodytes, and that they even had the capacity to rebel sent a deep thrill of terror throughout the magocracy. Even more frightening was the flood of rumours that this Romaldur wielded divine magic the likes of which Old Injil had thought destroyed a thousand years past. Not only did the prophet uplift the dwarves from the despair of enslavement, but he healed their ancient blindness, and lit their hearts with the twin passions of religious fervour and of war. At the same time that the dwarf-slaves began their uprising, a similarly shocking revolt broke out in Tefaruq, a land to the southeast of the Sea of Injil. This revolt was not one of slaves against their masters, but of a subject nation against its conqueror. The various clans and tribes of Tefaruq had long resisted being tamed by their Old Injili masters, but their disunity had made them easily dealt with: by pitting rival tribes against one another, the magocracy had maintained enough chaos to justify their own presence. However, a new figure had arisen among the Tefaruqi, one who, like Romaldur, used religious passion to incite war against the wizards. This figure, Rkagyu, was even more disturbing, however, because he was a dead man. He had been slain in an ambush several months before, his body spirited away into the forests by his soldiers. He had returned from the forests a moving corpse, animated by some sort of necromancy that Old Injil did not know: he was not a hungering monstrosity as all other undead were, but was rather a serene and holy creature that existed in accordance with nature. Among his many ardent followers, some of them came to rise from death as Rkagyu had, and this inspired ever greater fanaticism among the living members of the rebellion, for they knew that even death was no bar to their cause. The news spread across the breadth of the Empire, and the centre could not hold. The dwarves were always the first to rebel in a given province, but the human slaves followed shortly thereafter, and then the half-elves… Even the gnolls, who had long been thought of as nothing more than animals, began breaking out of their magical enslavement and fleeing into the wilderness, slaughtering their wizard masters in the process. The Nyadegtaan emerged from their isolation in Ezluthai to seize control of the Vrotispal Range, conquering Old Injili holdings there. The krolgashi of the Great Western Dakylsthas; the elves in their forests; the savage humans of Taresani and Edrask: all conjoined their purposes to Old Injil’s downfall. Though they spoke in a multitude of tongues and though their bloodlines were as various as the rivers of Kerlonna, they answered to a common name as “the Hosts of the Dawn”. The most dangerous of Old Injil’s enemies were the clerics, who the magocracy had thought long since eliminated. From out of hiding places deep in the wilds, from out of secret temples buried beneath cities, from out of nocturnal gatherings in the countryside when their masters were asleep, the divine mages returned, and they brought with them a thousand years of hate. The inhuman fury of the Gods was brought to bear against the wizards: burning out their eyes with blazing light, striking them down with plagues, filling their dreams with the foretelling of damnation. In their terror, the wizards inflicted lunatic ruin upon their foes, setting whole cities alight when they were lost to the rebel cause. Kerlonna bled. After a dozen years of ethnic rebellions, slave uprisings, and wizard reprisals, even the Injili cities themselves, though they had once been bloated on a thousand years of imperium, were in chaos. Takhär Šarrabdu was gutted by fire. Farsa’idh was blockaded for two years, driving its rebels to devour their own dead. Aškam simply disappeared, the shards of its rubble scattered for hundreds of miles. Whole tribes of slaves fled into the wilderness, among them a human people who would come to be known as the Rauprig-mut. By the fifteenth year, the magocracy formally relinquished control of all provinces beyond the Sea of Injil, and ordered its surviving armies to fall back to the homelands and defend them. From then on, records are too sparse to form a coherent picture of the war’s progress. In the end, the War for the Dawn did not have a dramatic conclusion as did the Binding War before it. Things fell apart: record-keeping stopped, the magocracy disintegrated, and several of Old Injil’s greatest cities were abandoned or in utter ruin. The dwarves left behind the lands of their enslavement and went beneath the earth once more, this time guided by the light of the Faceless God. Tefaruq, victorious in its rebellion, sealed its borders and forgot the world. The Injili civilisation slid into famine, poverty, and internecine warfare. The art of writing vanished across the breadth of Kerlonna. The Age of Silence had begun, and would endure for centuries to come.